Why Use Facebook Advertising? Because Your Customers Are Still There (Infographic)

I’ve been buying advertising for a long time, and one thing has stayed pretty consistent: advertisers want to eliminate waste.

If I’m selling something that primarily appeals to homeowners in Southern Oregon, I don’t particularly want to pay to advertise it to college students in Boston. If I’m promoting a restaurant, reaching someone 500 miles away isn’t terribly useful. And if I know something about the people most likely to become customers, I’d like my advertising dollars concentrated in their direction.

That was one of the things that made Facebook advertising so interesting when businesses first began using it seriously. Compared with most traditional media at the time, the targeting possibilities seemed almost ridiculously specific.

Some of that has changed. Facebook’s advertising tools have evolved, privacy expectations have changed, targeting options have changed, and Meta increasingly uses its own systems to help determine who within an eligible audience is most likely to respond.

But the basic reason I still consider Facebook advertising when building a media mix hasn’t changed much: it gives businesses access to a very large audience, useful targeting and optimization tools, strong visual formats, and the ability to measure what happens after an ad runs.

The trick is knowing what Facebook can do well—and not expecting it to do everything.

Facebook Advertising Is Not the Same as Posting on Facebook

This distinction matters because I still run into businesses that treat having a Facebook page and advertising on Facebook as essentially the same thing.

They aren’t.

Your Facebook page gives people a place to discover your business, see what you’ve been doing, engage with your content, and get a feel for the organization. Advertising gives you a way to deliberately put a message in front of people beyond those who happen to encounter your organic posts.

That difference became increasingly important as Facebook moved toward what businesses often called a pay-to-play environment. I wouldn’t build a Facebook strategy today around the assumption that posting something on a business page means a meaningful portion of your potential customers will automatically see it.

Organic social media can still serve a purpose. Paid distribution serves a different purpose.

The Targeting Is Still Useful, but It Has Changed

The original version of this article talked about Facebook’s ability to be “laser-focused.” At the time, that was one of the platform’s biggest selling points.

I’d soften that language today.

Advertisers still have meaningful ways to define who is eligible to see an ad, including things such as geography, age, interests, customer information you legitimately have permission to use, and people who have interacted with parts of your business online. But some of the extraordinarily granular targeting advertisers once relied on has disappeared, particularly around sensitive personal characteristics.

At the same time, the technology has moved toward allowing Meta’s systems more room to find people who are likely to produce the result you’ve asked for.

That means the job has changed a little. Instead of assuming success comes from manually building the narrowest audience imaginable, we spend more time thinking about the business objective, the quality of the data, the creative, the offer, geography, exclusions, and whether the campaign is giving the system useful signals to work with.

Start With the Result, Not the Audience Settings

This is where businesses can make Facebook advertising harder than it needs to be.

Before I start worrying about every possible audience option, I want to know what we’re trying to accomplish.

Are we trying to generate leads? Sell a product? Get people into a store? Build awareness in a new market? Promote an event? Reach existing customers with another offer? Introduce the business to people who have never heard of it?

Those objectives don’t necessarily belong in the same campaign.

Good campaign organization helps Meta understand what you’re asking it to accomplish and helps us understand what is actually producing results. Our article on best practices for structuring Facebook campaigns goes into that aspect of the process in more detail.

Creative Matters More Than Many Advertisers Think

You can have a perfectly configured audience and still run a lousy ad.

People don’t open Facebook hoping to see your advertisement. You are interrupting something they chose to do, so the creative has to earn enough attention to stop them from scrolling.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be flashy. In fact, flashy for no reason can work against you.

The image or video needs to make sense for the audience. The message needs to be understandable quickly. The offer needs to give someone a reason to care. And whatever happens after the click needs to continue the same conversation rather than dropping someone onto a generic page and expecting them to figure out what to do next.

This is where advertising stops being a targeting exercise and becomes marketing.

Facebook and Instagram Work Together

Another change from the early days of Facebook advertising is that I no longer think about Facebook entirely on its own.

Meta’s advertising system can place ads across Facebook, Instagram, and other eligible placements, depending on the campaign and settings. That gives advertisers more opportunities to reach people without necessarily creating an entirely separate media strategy for each placement.

Instagram also brings its own strengths, particularly when the product, service, story, or audience lends itself to strong visual communication. We’ve looked separately at the reasons businesses should consider Instagram advertising, but in practice, I often think of the two platforms as part of the same paid-social decision.

The question isn’t “Facebook or Instagram?” nearly as often as it once was. It’s where the right people are responding to the right creative.

First-Party Data Has Become More Important

Digital advertising has spent years making marketers increasingly dependent on data collected elsewhere on the internet. That environment has changed.

Privacy changes, browser restrictions, platform changes, and the decline of third-party tracking have made the information businesses collect through their own customer relationships more important.

That doesn’t mean you get to upload anything you happen to know about anybody. Businesses still need to collect and use customer information appropriately. But a healthy list of customers, prospects, subscribers, purchasers, and people who have chosen to interact with your business can give advertising platforms better information than simply guessing who might be interested.

This is part of a much bigger shift in digital advertising, which is why I think an online marketing strategy shouldn’t depend entirely on third-party cookies or any other single source of targeting data.

Facebook Advertising Can Work Especially Well for Local Businesses

This is one of the reasons Facebook continues to find its way into media plans I build for local businesses.

Geography matters.

If your realistic trade area is 10 or 20 miles around your business, I don’t need to buy an entire television market just to reach those people. If you have several locations, we can consider the areas around them. If you’re expanding into a neighboring community, we can concentrate additional effort there.

That ability to control geography can make paid social useful for restaurants, retailers, home-service businesses, healthcare providers, events, professional services, and plenty of other businesses whose customers come primarily from a defined area.

It doesn’t automatically make Facebook the best advertising choice. It makes it a worthwhile option.

Facebook Should Usually Be Part of a Mix, Not the Entire Plan

I’ve never particularly liked putting every advertising dollar in one basket.

Different media do different jobs.

Search advertising can reach someone actively looking for a solution. Radio can build frequency and familiarity across a market. Outdoor can provide repeated visibility in a geographic area. A video can demonstrate something difficult to explain in a static ad. Facebook and Instagram can put targeted messages into the feeds people use every day.

Which combination makes sense depends on the business, budget, audience, geography, and goal.

Our article on the best advertising strategies for small businesses looks at that bigger question, because “Where should I advertise?” should never be answered by whichever salesperson happened to call that morning.

Coordinate the Message Across the Media You Buy

If Facebook is part of a larger campaign, it shouldn’t feel as though a completely different company created it.

The offer, positioning, visual language, and timing should make sense alongside the other places the campaign appears. That doesn’t mean running the same ad everywhere. A six-second video and a search ad obviously have different requirements.

But they should be working toward the same business objective.

I’ve always believed your advertising dollars should work as one coordinated marketing effort. Facebook is a media channel. It isn’t a separate marketing universe.

Measurement Is Useful, but Don’t Fall in Love With the Dashboard

One of digital advertising’s great advantages is that we can see an enormous amount of information about what happened.

It is also one of its great temptations.

Just because Meta can show me a number doesn’t mean that number is the thing I should care about most.

Cheap clicks are not particularly exciting if none of those people become customers. A beautiful engagement rate doesn’t pay the electric bill. Lots of video views may be valuable for an awareness campaign and nearly meaningless if the actual objective was qualified leads.

I want to know whether the advertising did the job we hired it to do.

That sounds obvious. You’d be surprised how often advertising gets judged by whichever number happens to look nicest in the report.

The Media-Buying Part Has Changed, but the Job Hasn’t

When I started in media, buying advertising involved a lot more conversations with individual media representatives, rate cards, schedules, and negotiations. Digital platforms have automated a large portion of that process.

Automation doesn’t eliminate the need for media strategy.

Somebody still needs to decide what the objective is, how much money to allocate, which audiences matter, what creative belongs in the market, how long the campaign should run, which other media should support it, and how we’ll decide whether it worked.

The tools changed. The thinking didn’t disappear.

That broader shift is something we’ve explored in the evolution of media planning and buying. Facebook advertising is a pretty good example of how much the mechanics can change while the fundamental job remains remarkably familiar.

So, Why Use Facebook Advertising?

Because for the right business, it can still put a relevant message in front of a useful audience at a scale and budget that makes sense.

Not because Facebook has a magic targeting button.

Not because every business needs to advertise there.

And definitely not because a Facebook ad can somehow compensate for a weak offer, bad creative, or a lousy customer experience.

Use Facebook advertising when the audience is there, the format fits what you need to communicate, the geography makes sense, and the campaign has a clear job to do.

Then measure whether it did that job.

If you’re trying to decide where Facebook and Instagram fit into your overall advertising mix, give us a call. We buy media because it makes sense for the client—not because we need every client on the same platform.

A Look Back: Facebook Ad Targeting in 2018

The infographic below accompanied the original version of this article. We’re keeping it because it is an interesting snapshot of just how granular Facebook ad targeting had become by 2018.

It should not be used as a current Facebook advertising targeting guide. Meta has changed, removed, restricted, and automated targeting capabilities since this infographic was created. Think of it as a little piece of digital-advertising history—and a reminder of just how quickly the mechanics of media buying can change.